How a Steady Press Releases Can Benefit Businesses

One Time/Monthly Press Releases

Press releases provide remarkable benefits
for businesses. Everything from more traffic to your website, more customers
coming to your place of business, and more inbound phone calls to even momentous
events like strategic partnerships with related businesses, and even finding
that right Venture Capital partner are possible through press releases.

Not only that, but compared to more
tradition advertising, press release marketing is very cost-effective. How much
are you considering spending on your next radio spot,
or your next round of Facebook ads? Those may or may not be working for you,
but why not try a diet of monthly press releases in addition to everything else
you’re doing?

Because it is so important that you
understand the power of press release marketing, let’s talk in some detail
about what you can expect out of your next press release campaign.

Instant Exposure for Your Business

One of the most important aspects of online
press releases are their immediacy. When
a press release is published on a
platform like PRWeb, or some other
reputable platform, the business gets
instant exposure. With most platforms
there are several “levels” to choose from when you publish (and we’ll get into
all of that later). Having said that,
with any reputable platform, your press release will get distributed to
thousands of news sites, news blogs, other blogs, and other types of
outlets…immediately.

Press releases are not, however, ephemeral. They don’t vanish at some date in the future. Another huge benefit is they stay online essentially forever. As long as the Internet exists, your press release will be there, gathering traffic and sending traffic and interested parties to your website and to your business.

Increased Sales

With exposure, often comes increased sales. Although, this isn’t a guaranteed outcome for a given press release (just as it’s not for any given instance of advertising), if you are using press releases intelligently, and consistently in your marketing efforts, it’s going to be difficult not to see an increase in sales.

There are several ways that a press release can boost your sales.

One way is just the fact that people
searching for your product or service will naturally run across your press
release. The press release should contain links to your website, which
interested parties can click. Also, if you have multimedia…videos, PDFs, infographics, images, things
like that…this will only increase your visitor engagement. And, if you’re proactive about spreading those
multimedia assets around, publishing the videos for
instance, you’ll get even more clicks as people see that particular marketing
asset. This isn’t the only way your press
release can boost your sales, however.

Another way people can find your press
release is on blogs and news sites. Bloggers and news sites need content, and
one of the best places for them to get that content is from press releases
whose subject is allied with their market niche. These sites often publish the
press releases outright, with a link back to your website, or they do what’s
called “curating” the press release. Basically,
curating means writing a short paragraph introducing a piece of content, then
linking from that to the original, longer source. Considering how many blogs
and new sites should pick up your press
release, you’ll get even more traffic to your website from this. As long as
your website actually works as a
marketing funnel for your business, that traffic should naturally drip down and
turn into sales.

Even better, there’s a cumulative effect
that happens if you publish press releases regularly. Press releases are
evergreen. They’re indexed by Google, and
often show up on the first page of relevant searches. As you get more and more
press releases out there, you’ll cumulatively get more traffic from those press
releases to your website, calls to your business number, and important inquires from people who want to buy to
investors who want to invest.

Boosts Effectiveness of Your Other Marketing Campaigns

A press release is one of the best ways to
inexpensively amp up the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. Let’s say you’re
going to a trade show in August. A great strategy would be to book-end this trade show with a press release.
One release announces your appearance there, and the other press release
announces that you were there and hopefully something newsworthy that came out
of that event. Just by doing this one thing,
you’ve both advertised your company’s participation at the trade show, thus
getting more and more interested parties both knowing about the trade show, and
also knowing about your company, and you’ve used the second press release to
ride the tail wind of the press release a little longer, turning it into even
more of a marketing success.

What about other marketing events? Are you
launching a radio spot about your new local business service? If so, you need a
press release, perhaps two…one about the service itself and the other about the
radio spot. Do you think it might sound goofy to write a press release about
advertising? Not at all! Especially not if your advertising has a new twist on
it. Announce the twist and get more people knowing about your business and its
products.

Let’s say you’re doing in depth videos about a new process in your
business. Well…you’re going to at least
put those videos on YouTube, right? Now what you need to do is to publish a
press release about your new, educational YouTube channel.

Bottom line, be creative! The more press releases you get out there, the more traffic you get, the more sales you make!

Brands You as an Industry Thought Leader and Your
Company as Cutting-Edge

Years ago, a couple of advertising geniuses,
Al Ries and Jack Trout, wrote a seminal book called Positioning:
The Battle For Your Mind. In
their book, they argued that brands, like Tide, for instance, hold certain
“positions” in our minds. So, when you think of clean, fresh smelling clothes,
you’re more likely to think to buy Tide than another brand.

The positioning concept isn’t just for big
businesses and Madison Avenue. You run a business that’s defined either by
product type or location, or both. How
would you like to start positioning your business, or yourself, as a market
leader in your niche?

Press releases can do that, probably easier than any other form of advertising, much easier than, say, having a ghost writer write a book for you.

A diet of press releases talking about your
business, your innovations, your speaking gigs, your trade show appearances, etc., can, over time, build you up as one of
the true thought leaders in your business niche.

Why should this appeal to you? Well, for one
thing, businesses that are seen as the
market leaders are trusted more by customers and clients. Trust is the first
hurdle any potential buyer needs to overcome before they buy something.

In addition, should you need capital or new management to take your business to
the next level, you as a market leader are going to attract the right
investors, the right management team, much easier if you’re the leader in your field.

Who, by the way, decides that you are
actually the leader in your field?

Here’s the “dirty little secret”.

You do!

And, one of the best ways to create and
announce that fact is through press releases.

Increased Traffic to Your Website

Let me ask you a quick question.

How much money did you spend on your
website? How much is your hosting a month?

Now, the hard part…

How many sales per month is your website
responsible for? What’s the ROI (Return
on Investment) of your website?

If you’re like a lot of businesses, your website is used more like a glorified,
digital business card than a money-making asset. It can be so much more, though!

Of course, there are several steps in
turning your website from being just an Internet place holder to being a money
spewing asset. And, that first step is
getting more and more potential customers or clients to actually visit the site. One of the best ways to accomplish this
is through press releases.

Think about it! Press releases attract only
the best quality traffic online. Only someone truly interested in your
newsworthy event is going to actually read your
press release. So, they filter your potential traffic, filtering out the
“tire kickers” before the even land on
your home page.

Even better, press releases pre-sell that
traffic by predisposing them to think of your business and your products or
services in only the best light.

Thus, the traffic you get from press
releases is, for lack of a better word, golden!

Again, as you publish more and more press
releases, you’ll build up more and more of that golden, highly targeted
traffic.

Yet another reason to start your business on a steady diet of press
releases!

Important SEO Benefits

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Basically, this is the process of creating traffic to websites by various means, other than pay-per-click advertising.

When someone publishes a page on a website,
Google crawls it. The Google “bot” figures out what the page is about (from the
text on the page) and then decides where that particular page is going to rank
for a variety of searches that someone might do, or that people have done in
the page.

Your website is going to get more traffic
“organically” if the pages on your site rank
higher for the given searches that Google assigns to them. The higher the
rankings, the more likely people are to find your listing and click through to
go to the page.

Although you can’t determine where you rank
outright, you can do things to positively
influence your rankings, and press releases are one of the best ways to
do that!

One of the most important ranking factors
that Google takes into account when deciding where to rank a given web page is
the number, source, and quality of the links coming into that page from other
web pages. These are called “backlinks”,
because they are inbound into the page in question, pointing back to it, as it
were.

A link from a press release published in a
reputable site like PRWeb would be
considered a very valuable backlink! So, the more press releases you publish
that contain more and more links back to various pages in your website, the
better those pages rank in relevant searches. Of course, those Google searches
are done by people who might be potential customers, clients, investors, or
partners! The more press releases you publish, the more traffic you get, the
more sales you make, the faster your business grows!

One of the big problems with any advertising
is targeting the ad to right potential
buyers. A billboard on an expressway is a great example. So, let’s say you own
a plumbing company, and you pay to have a billboard show on one of the major
commuter expressways in your city. You’ll get massive exposure here! Literally, thousands upon thousands of cars
will drive by ever single day! Yet, how many of those drivers and passengers
who actually see your billboard will actually need a plumber any time soon?

Of course, this is all worked out via the
free market and the price on for the billboard. And,
I’m sure businesses who understand billboard advertising do very well. But, you have to admit, on a daily basis, 99%
of the people who even glance at the billboard won’t need a plumber.

Let’s use an example online. How about ads
on Facebook.

So, what if you own a chain of high-end hair
salons, and you want to beef up your business using Facebook ads? Although you can
do some targeting with Facebook ads, many of the people seeing them either
won’t need their hair done right at that moment, or they’ll live too far away
to use one of your shops.

What’s the problem here? You would, after
all, be getting thousands of impressions of the Facebook ad. (An impression is
one instance of one person being exposed
to the ad.)

The problem here is in the targeting of the
ad. Again, just like the billboard example, only a very small fraction of the
people actually seeing the ad will need
your business’s service or product. And
that can very well become an issue if you’re spending too much money on your
ads than you’re bringing in in new
customers or clients. (Basically, I’m saying, in this example, that those ads
would have a negative ROI.)